Pod Insights Throughline What the banana tells us about US history About this episode What do bananas have to do with American history? On this week’s episode, how the sweet fruit became an American staple because of one entrepreneur who took business off US shores, expanding the country’s economic reach and influence.
To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript 2,361 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from NPR sponsor, the Capital One Venture X Business Card. Earn unlimited double miles on every purchase with the Capital One Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details.
0:16 Rund Abdelfatah? This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.
0:33 Speaker 02 Right now, bananas are so ubiquitous in our lives that we can't imagine life without them.
0:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah, you heard that right. Bananas, as in the sweet tropical fruit that's become a mainstay of American breakfast. OK, so the reason we're talking about bananas is because they help us understand a key part of American history.
0:52 Speaker 02 The Teddy Roosevelt era.
0:54 Rund Abdelfatah? When, at the turn of the 20th century...
0:56 Speaker 02 This was a time when rugged men went out to make their name in the world.
1:00 Rund Abdelfatah? The idea of what constituted America and its sphere of influence started to expand far beyond its borders.
1:08 Speaker 02 It's the era of machismo, of doing things. The world belonged to them. It was theirs for the taking.
1:15 Rund Abdelfatah? So what's this got to do with bananas? Well, today on the show, we're going to tell you the story of how one American entrepreneur named Minor Keefe helped bring the banana to the American diet by looking beyond the US's shores and becoming the uncrowned king of Central America. We'll bring you that story right after a quick break.
1:41 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
1:46 Speaker 04 The 2026 midterm elections are upon us. On November 3rd, voters will determine what the next two years of their local leadership and the balance of national government will look like. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast for all the updates you need ahead of and after November 3rd from NPR News.
2:08 Speaker 05 American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him, and now we finally have some answers.
2:20 Rund Abdelfatah? This is the prison that Austin was in.
2:21 Speaker 03 Oh my god, we found Austin's file.
2:25 Speaker 05 Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:33 Speaker 06 Instead of scrolling mindlessly, engage mindfully with the NPR app. With a mix of on-demand news, stories from the station and your favorite podcasts, you can relax without shutting off your brain. Download the NPR app today.
2:50 Speaker 02 Minor Keith had grown up in Brooklyn, New York, and he had become a cattle rancher in Texas. It's a very common motif in America for patrician or urban types to become cowboys.
3:05 Rund Abdelfatah? This is writer Dan Koppel.
3:09 Speaker 02 I sometimes pretentiously like to call myself a thing biographer. I write about the histories of objects, and I'm best known for writing a book called Banana, The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.
3:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Dan says this shift towards aggressive entrepreneurship started around the time of the Civil War, when communication and transportation networks rapidly expanded thanks to advances in mining and agriculture, which enticed people to develop new lands. Railroads began moving people west, and the world seemed ripe for the taking.
3:41 Speaker 02 They were gold rush people, basically. All these American business people were trying to find some form of gold. So any business that could make them a lot of money.
3:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Right, and Minor Keith, the city kid from a wealthy family, who had tried his hand at running a cattle ranch, at being a cowboy, was at heart a budding entrepreneur. He wanted to make it really big, to be among the Carnegie's and Rockefeller's of the world. And he thought railroads might be that business for him.
4:10 Speaker 02 In the United States, there's a railroad building boom, but it's controlled by moguls, by conglomerates, by people who are already rich. There's not a lot of room for entrepreneurship. There's not a lot of room for a Brooklyn-born Texas cattle rancher to become a big wheel.
4:30 Rund Abdelfatah? So Keith decided to look beyond the US for opportunities. His uncle was working on railroads in Chile, Peru, and Costa Rica and invited him to come there.
4:43 Rund Abdelfatah? At the time, there was very little infrastructure in Central America.
4:46 Speaker 02 These were villages with dirt roads.
4:49 Rund Abdelfatah? But people were determined to find a way to the Pacific through Central America, what Columbus had wanted to do. Why Central America?
4:57 Speaker 02 Because of the unimaginable, or imagined, let's say, riches that might happen there.
5:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Things like coffee, minerals, maybe actual gold.
5:09 Rund Abdelfatah? And even though Keith knew pretty much nothing about Costa Rica, he figured, hell, why not? I can do this. This is my chance to make it big, whatever challenges may come.
5:22 Rund Abdelfatah? But on the flip side, he probably thought, if I build this railroad, then I'll have access to all those riches.
5:29 Speaker 02 I think what miner Keith understood was that if you build infrastructure in these places where there is no infrastructure, and you make the right financial deals by hook or by crook, honestly or dishonestly, you are going to get very rich and you're going to get very, very powerful.
5:49 Rund Abdelfatah? If you're wondering why a government would open their arms to a fairly inexperienced foreign businessman, it's pretty simple. They needed the help. They wanted to find a way to export their coffee crops, the country's main export, to Europe. And to do that, they needed to tap into their eastern coast.
6:06 Speaker 02 And it was the jungle.
6:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Up until the 1870s, most of Costa Rica, east of the capital, San Jose, was completely undeveloped, just miles and miles of nearly impenetrable rainforest. The Spanish had made few inroads there. They'd killed and resettled some indigenous communities, but they didn't actually manage to build much.
6:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very, it's beautiful, but it's very rugged terrain and...
6:32 Rund Abdelfatah? And every square inch is basically green. I mean, dense beyond belief. You look up and it's just webs of winding branches and leaves. Keith wanted to build a railroad through all of that, stretching 100 miles from San Jose to Limón.
6:47 Speaker 07 It wasn't an easy task.
6:51 Speaker 07 We have to say that.
6:52 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Victor Acuna Ortega. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Costa Rica.
6:58 Speaker 07 He faced technological challenges, environmental challenges, and financial challenges.
7:05 Speaker 02 I mean, this was really, really crazy.
7:11 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1872, Keith began construction in Limón.
7:18 Rund Abdelfatah? At first, he recruited Costa Rica's population to build the railroad, which at the time was very small. But as the project got underway, many began to realize just how difficult and dangerous it was.
7:32 Speaker 02 They are tearing the jungle down with hand tools.
7:35 Speaker 07 The work conditions were very, very hard because of climate, because of tropical diseases.
7:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Trees would sometimes fall on them. It rained a lot of the time, so they were often working in mud. If they got any sort of cut or wound, it could easily become infected.
7:54 Rund Abdelfatah? And mosquitoes were everywhere, some carrying diseases.
8:00 Rund Abdelfatah? So after a little while, Costa Ricans laid down their tools.
8:06 Speaker 02 They were like, "We're not going to do this because no job is worth dying for."
8:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Construction stalled, and Keith was back at square one. He had to find workers somewhere else.
8:15 Speaker 02 Luckily, or unluckily, there's this huge immigrant population in the United States, and so Keith returns to the US and hires a couple of thousand Italian immigrants. And he tempts them. You know, he says, "We're going to pay you a lot of money. We're going to give you a lot of work."
8:30 Rund Abdelfatah? He also brought workers from China and parts of Europe.
8:34 Speaker 02 And once they get down there and they hear what's happening and they see what's happening and they see how dangerous it is, they begin going AWOL.
8:44 Speaker 07 It was a total disaster.
8:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Hundreds died, then thousands, in part because these men had never been to the tropics. So they weren't used to the climate or its diseases. And the work was just really grueling.
9:03 Speaker 02 Among the workers who died on this project were Keith's two brothers. You know, so this was deadly, not just for the poor souls who were sort of suckered into coming and working on it, but the guys at the very top as well.
9:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Progress was slow and money was tight. A few years into the project, they were 30 miles from their end goal, San Jose. But Keith remained determined and desperate for workers. He decided to recruit prisoners.
9:34 Speaker 02 Hopeless prisoners, people in jail in New Orleans, people who have no way out. And he basically calls for volunteers. And he says, anybody who volunteers, helps me build my railroad to completion, is going to get a pardon. 700 prisoners volunteer, but only 25 prisoners survive to get their pardons. 25 out of 700.
10:03 Rund Abdelfatah? People would die. Minor Keith would find more. They died, more came. He was relentless. Eventually, Minor Keith figured out that if he brought Jamaicans over from the Caribbean, they would have an easier time working on his railroad since they spoke English and were used to the climate. Thing is, by this point, Minor Keith had another problem. He'd burned through millions of dollars and was nearly out of money.
10:32 Speaker 02 And the Costa Rican government, which is sort of funding this thing partially, also goes broke.
10:38 Speaker 08 I mean, at this point, most people would just throw in the towel and go home.
10:42 Rund Abdelfatah? That's the logical thing to do, probably. But instead...
10:46 Speaker 02 Keith goes to England.
10:48 Rund Abdelfatah? And he borrows 1.2 million pounds.
10:50 Speaker 02 Which is, I think, about the equivalent of maybe 150, 200 million dollars today.
10:56 Rund Abdelfatah? Then he goes back to Costa Rica and proposes a new deal to the government.
11:00 Speaker 02 This sort of crazy deal.
11:01 Rund Abdelfatah? He says...
11:02 Speaker 02 I'll build the railroad for free. In return, you give me 99 years, concession along the route. I have 800,000 acres of land, tax-free alongside the tracks, and I have full control of the port at Limone.
11:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Not a great deal for the Costa Rican government, but they were in a pretty bad position at this point and just needed to finish the railroad.
11:26 Speaker 07 Minor Keith, he was a very good entrepreneur and he was very able to negotiate. And he was able to put himself somebody indispensable for the Costa Rican government, who was capable of finishing the railroad.
11:50 Rund Abdelfatah? So work on the railroad continued.
11:53 Speaker 08 And at this point Keith had like really managed to dig himself out of a hole, right?
11:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Absolutely. I mean, now he had the support of the country's elite, a workforce that could handle the climate, total control of the port of Limón, and 800,000 acres of tax-free land.
12:10 Speaker 02 And what he did with that land at first was he grew bananas. And he didn't grow them to make money. He grew them to feed his workers, the ones who weren't dying by the dozen or two dozen.
12:21 Rund Abdelfatah? As an American, Keith had little experience with bananas. They weren't really available in the US since they only grow in tropical climates.
12:32 Rund Abdelfatah? But around this time, some people were beginning to experiment with ways to bring bananas
12:37 Speaker 02 This rare tropical fruit.
12:39 Rund Abdelfatah? to the United States. And after planting a few banana trees alongside the railroad, Minor Keith realized why.
12:48 Speaker 02 It's really easy to grow.
12:51 Speaker 02 You know, you get a few banana trees and from those few, you can grow a farm. And from those farms, you can create a plantation with rows after row of banana trees. And from that plantation, you can create a nation of banana trees.
13:07 Rund Abdelfatah? And that's when the light bulb went off. He had a lot of land at his disposal and soon he would have a railroad and a port all to himself. So Minor Cooper Keith set his sights on another, potentially much bigger, business opportunity: bananas.
13:32 Rund Abdelfatah? By the time the railroad was completed in 1890, miner Keith was officially in the banana business. A few years later, he would be the co-founder of the United Fruit Company, which would go on to grow beyond Costa Rica. And Keith would go on to have his hands in everything. He ran the postal service in Guatemala. He set up a telegraph communications network throughout Central America, built rail lines between Mexico and Guatemala, Guatemala and El Salvador, connecting cities across the region. And he controlled ports all along the Caribbean coast of Central America. People in these countries gave United Fruit the nickname El Pulpo, the octopus. And Keith...
14:16 Speaker 02 Sort of became known as the uncrowned king of Central America.
14:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Keith was the king. Bananas were catching on in the continental United States. And business seemed good. Until it wasn't.
14:40 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. Want to know what ended up happening to miner Keith and how the banana came to dominate American kitchens? Make sure to check out Throughline's full-length episode, There Will Be Bananas. And make sure to join us next week when we explore the origins of something that's been in the news recently and has been a hallmark of American identity for over 150 years: birthright citizenship.
15:07 Speaker 09 He said, "Yes, I'm a laborer, I'm a chef, but I'm a citizen." And here's the proof: he had his certificates. He knew that he was born in the United States, and that meant he was a US citizen.
15:17 Rund Abdelfatah? The story of Wong Kim Mark and the fight for birthright citizenship. That's next week. Don't miss it.
15:27 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music, as always, by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Rande Abdelfattah...
15:48 Speaker 08 And Ramtin Arablouei. Thank you for listening.
15:57 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
16:01 Speaker 10 This message comes from HomeServe. Got a burst pipe, HVAC outage, or electrical issue? HomeServe has your back. Go to homeserve.com/audio for 50% less your first year. Savings compared to renewal price, Fortin, Florida.
Previous How Saudi Arabia shaped Silicon Valley Next Al Capone and the transformation of the IRS Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated